What Grades Really Communicate: Rethinking Grades as Institutional Messages

Grades appear simple, but they carry layered judgments about effort, achievement, and the conditions that shape how learning is pursued and what it comes to mean. Traditional scalar grades collapse these layers into a single value, obscuring the interpretive work that assessment entails. This paper reframes grading as institutional communication and introduces a vector representation that makes its interpretive structure explicit. By separating what students did, what they produced, and the time-indexed conditions that shaped the meaning of their work, the model formalizes reasoning already used in practice while providing a common structure within which contemporary reforms can coexist. The approach also addresses the ethical limits of representation: it treats Difficulty as historically situated, clarifies when cross-context comparisons lack warrant, and builds a principled capacity to abstain into the record. In shifting validity from a property of scores to a practice of responsible speech, the framework offers not a new metric but a clearer way for institutions to communicate educational judgment—transparent, situated, and proportionate to the evidence.Preprint of a manuscript submitted to Educational Theory for review.